Back around the start of February, I bought a used Razer DeathStalker Ultimate keyboard for my Blue Iris PC. I wrote some software to customize its built-in touchpad and 10 tactile buttons, so I can use them to control a number of z-wave and infrared devices in my house.
Basically, this keyboard has two LCD panels where the numpad goes. The upper one is overlaid by 10 transparent keys, so the screen shows through, effectively creating ten LCD-backed keys. The lower display is a full multi-touch screen. There is an SDK which lets you send 16-bit images for the individual buttons and the touch panel, which I used to create this.
I like physical buttons, and always drooled over the Optimus keyboards which are always too expensive, or not being produced, precisely because I could use such a keyboard to build something like this. Razer's implementation is actually better though because it lets you have physical buttons AND a fully programmable touchpad.
Just for fun, this uses my own crude UI framework and font renderer. I even drew the font myself in a paint program. If any C# developers are interested in reusing my code for this, I'm willing to share it. Just be aware it was cobbled together in about two days, and the code is messy. It is not in such a state as to be usable by someone who can't build a c# program, so I don't encourage just anyone to go out and buy one of these keyboards hoping to use it as a home automation controller.
Basically, this keyboard has two LCD panels where the numpad goes. The upper one is overlaid by 10 transparent keys, so the screen shows through, effectively creating ten LCD-backed keys. The lower display is a full multi-touch screen. There is an SDK which lets you send 16-bit images for the individual buttons and the touch panel, which I used to create this.
I like physical buttons, and always drooled over the Optimus keyboards which are always too expensive, or not being produced, precisely because I could use such a keyboard to build something like this. Razer's implementation is actually better though because it lets you have physical buttons AND a fully programmable touchpad.
Just for fun, this uses my own crude UI framework and font renderer. I even drew the font myself in a paint program. If any C# developers are interested in reusing my code for this, I'm willing to share it. Just be aware it was cobbled together in about two days, and the code is messy. It is not in such a state as to be usable by someone who can't build a c# program, so I don't encourage just anyone to go out and buy one of these keyboards hoping to use it as a home automation controller.
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